What's up with all the Opterons?

[gaara]

For clarifications, Opterons were originally intended for workstation use and originated on the socket 940 package using ECC memory...they were bridged to socket 939 as an alternative for smaller businesses with tighter budgets wanting an Opteron without the more expensive ECC memory

I believe the only thing that seperates the Opteron processors from the Athlons is the fact that the Opterons are speedbinned and/or vcorebinned much more extensively than Athlons for stability purposes...one could say that Opterons use a higher quality silicon than an Athlon but in reality a Venus is simply a San Diego which has been tested more extensively

 

[reggie_da_man]

I know Opteron's were originally intended for servers, that's why I'm kind of sitting the fence. Does anyone have a link to a benchmark of an Opterton vs an Athlon in gaming?

 

[gaara]

Well as I said all K8 architecture is the same therefore one processor of the same core frequency, HTT frequency and cache size is the equivelent of any other K8 processor of the same core frequency, HTT frequency and cache size

The only differences between the Opteron and Athlon that I have found are that the Opterons have multiple HTT links, used for communicating between one another in a multiprocessor enviroment, which is irrelevent in a socket 939 enviroment, and like I mentioned above, most people seem to believe that Opterons are tested slightly harder than Athlons for stability purposes therefore Opterons should in theory yield higher overclocks

Basically you're not looking at any difference between a 144 and a 3700+ except maybe a few FPS which is ridiculous to base your purchase on

 

[Counter-Strike]

Well said! I think that Opterons are fine, but if your gaming, just sticjk with an Athlon. Opterons would be awesome if companies like Tyan could make dual-processor boards that supported PCI-E instead of AGP so it wouldn't necessarily bottleneck :|

 

[reggie_da_man]

Well said! I think that Opterons are fine, but if your gaming, just sticjk with an Athlon. Opterons would be awesome if companies like Tyan could make dual-processor boards that supported PCI-E instead of AGP so it wouldn't necessarily bottleneck :|

lol

The only differences between the Opteron and Athlon that I have found are that the Opterons have multiple HTT links, used for communicating between one another in a multiprocessor enviroment, which is irrelevent in a socket 939 enviroment, and like I mentioned above, most people seem to believe that Opterons are tested slightly harder than Athlons for stability purposes therefore Opterons should in theory yield higher overclocks

So why is the Opteron cheaper than the Athlon if they can get higher clocks, have better silicon and have been tested more?